We drove for most of Sunday and into the night, buying supplies along the way. We were aiming for midnight: unfortunately, thanks to a gas station close to the main highway being closed, the run into Gerlach was nightmarish and we didn't actually get through the gates til about 11.30am - there were HUGE queues and I don't even want to go into details about all the different aspects of the nightmare, really..... and there really isn't a lot to report. I really was not a fun person to be around for about 36 hours.

Fun really started happening from Wednesday afternoon onwards (as Monday and Tues evenings were both taken up mostly with AWWW, and Tuesday was sleeping) when I briefly caught up with T, my playabuddy from Portland who I only get to see @ BM, and I started doing a bit of wandering on my own. We did have the bar running on Tue & Wed eve and so we did a few hours, but I did a brief run out to the temple and did a bit of catharsising mid-evening, checking the Beacon at several times and the last trip yay the AWWW was out! Poor guys had huge printer problems :(

Thursday was however my first super fun day. Daytime involved wandering out to try and catch up with Tzara, but with him not being around, I went up to the Antipodean gathering @ Couchsurfing Camp, which was fun because R was there and so we all had sno-cones and met some lovely Kiwis and Aussies.

... then wandered down to the 42 Below Camp where the kiwis there were putting on a GIGANTIC lamb roast, so had some food and chatted with random people and drank vodka, and then I toodled off home with my first ride on an art car for the year. It was a minimalist pirate ship :) Later in the evening we were kinda planning on being in the bar for a bit, but P & K appeared and so we all went on an adventure with R, A & B too! First stop was DAFT PUNK:

Seriously - this rumour had been going around everywhere that Daft Punk were actually going to be be playing. Naturally I had to check it out if only for the lulz, which were indeed, epic.

Next stop: Skinny Kitty Cafe, which was awesome: real dessicated cats! 3 of them! In a box!

And then, Flaming Lotus Girls! After that was more wanderings, and then - INFECTED MUSHROOM!

From here on, Friday - Friday was STEAMPUNK DAY!

We hosted a Steampunk High Tea that despite being poorly advertised thanks to not being placed (and whoever was supposed to actually submit the listings, apparently not doing so in time for the WWW) we did have a number of delightful visitors. I even posed with one of their fantastical vehicles.

We then went wandering, and visited some of our new found acquaintances' Time Machine.

Later this eve we wended our way to the Gothic Raygun Rocketship Launch which took way too long but was okay in the end (very pretty fireballs) We met some of the other steampunk crew @ The Neverwas Haul which was highly visible and which we followed subsequently to - the Steampunk Rave! At which we boarded and had a good look around, it was most agreeable. The steampunk rave really was just a group of steampunk art cars and some live music from Hillbillies on The Front Porch, and some opera singing from Fat Mandy who's voice I recognised when she sang at the Flaming Lotus Girls' thingy in 2006. But it was awesome.

The Front Porch was an art car done up like a front porch or a hillbilly shack (with two porches and a door in between), and they had a working oven on board and were baking COOKIES and giving them out right in the middle of the playa. Pretty impressive. We got welcomed on by a couple of the lads with that crew (as we very much looked the part) and had a grand time, even in the teeth of a duststorm. We hitched a ride home with them too, which was damn brilliant! I gave one of the guys some goggles as he had lost his, poor chap. I'm hoping he's kept them! :D

And frankly - there's not a whole lot more to tell. Saturday we slept in a fair bit and made lots of bacon for everyone: then went to see the man burn kinda late cos there'd been a lot of dust storminess during the day. But it was a great burn. I completely failed to take pictures of any of our Burn Night adventures which involved hitching a really bangingart car out to 10 oclock and then wandering to Space Elevator, the psytrance sound camp; then finding a green bike and wending our way via some random entertainments to Abstininthe one of my favourite camps ever, and getting Jeremy Very Drunk Indeed: some of our steampunk freinds from the day before happened to stop in as well and we talked all matter of bollocks until suddenly it was 4.30am....and we staggered home across the playa.

Sunday was all full of helping to dismantle the dome and pack up camp. Then the Temple Burn which was I think the most stunning I had witnessed - Temple and Man were both masterfully beautiful structures this year, and inspired me more than ever to be more involved in Kiwiburn. Unforutnately I got separated from my crew for the actual burn because I tried to catch up with T one more time, so watched the temple burn along, which actually was oddly appropriate given my visit earlier in the week.

Then, time to leave. We had worries with our RV but managed to leave pretty much when we planned to at 3am on Monday morning... getting back into SF the following day at 11amish. Only thing we did in SF was randomly bump into A & B @ Five & Diamond and later meet up at BAGG, then met up with N for dinner the following night. Then back to LA, for an AMAZING trip to The Edison: if you're ever in LA, trust me - GO. Photo's simply cannot do it justice, the scale is amazing, the detail, incredible. There's some pics on Flickr but seriously, they don't compare.

Okay, I think that's all - I'm tired and I think I need to sleep. I might do another post on the more philosophical aspects of BM this time for me ... but this post is long enough I think. Hope the ramble was worth reading :)